From Farm to Fridge: Cultivating Fresh Baby Food With the Co-Founders of Once Upon a Farm

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And welcome back to the podcast. I'm your host, Neal Bloom and I am joined by the co founders of Once Upon a Farm, Cassandra Curtis and Ari Raz. Thanks for joining us.

Yeah, thanks for having us.

Great to be here, Ari.

We go back a bit and I'm glad we get to finally tell your guys story. So Cassandra, do you want to give us a brief overview of what Once Upon a Farm is?

Yeah, I'd love to. So Once Upon a Farm, we started as the first refrigerated baby food on the market. We're now a kids nutrition platform brand. We have baby food all the way up to products for ages 0 to 12. And we have some really exciting things around the corner to continue to age up the brand.

Awesome. Well, we're going to dive deep into that. We want to know the story of how it got started, but first we want to get to know you guys a little bit. Ari, have you always been in food or how did you come to be into that industry?

Well, I've always been into food.

True.

I grew up around the kitchen. I grew up loving my mom. Loved. She cooked everything from scratch that we ever ate. And I would say my mom was pretty ahead of her time when it came to her life and the way she lived her life. She received yoga teacher certification training in the early 90s. Like before, it was cool, but it was still kind of weird and a little edgy and really started eating whole plant based nutrition, you know, for the most part, with a little bit of meat through most of the 90s, which is how I grew up. So I grew up eating food that back then seemed very strange. You know, I would come to school with sprouted grain bread with avocado and alfalfa sprout sandwiches, and everybody looked at me like I was a fruit freak of nature. But, you know, today I imagine kids would be like, oh, that looks pretty good, right? Like they're a little bit more used to that kind of thing.

So was this in the 818 in the valley, right?

This was in the 818. That's right.

I'm a Valley boy, too. I appreciate it.

Yeah, this is too funny, too. I'm learning something else about you, Ari, because during our innovation strategy call today, when we went and asked the questions, think about things that you ate as a kid, one of the things that popped up for me was the sprout and avocado sandwich. So we had something in common back then as well.

Good to know. Yeah. Shout out to Northridge, by the way. Northridge, California. All right, so then for me, I actually got into the food industry, oddly enough, when I lived in South Korea. So I went there to teach English for one year, and I ended up spending the next five years of my life living in Seoul, South Korea, starting in 2009. All the way until 2009. 10, 11, 12. Yeah, 13. So I spent five years of my life there. By my second year, I decided to go for an MBA, went to business school in South Korea, which was an incredible experience. And while I was doing my mba, I started interning for a company called Latte, which you might not be familiar with, but they're one of the largest food companies in the world, certainly in Asia. They're a mega, mega company, multibillion dollar company that I always Tell people. It's like if you took Hershey and Wrigley and General Mills and combined them into a company and then added a whole bunch of other companies that own hotels and even an amusement park and coffee shops and like, bundled everything together, it's. It's massive. But I was just enamored by the experience of being able to work on projects that involved food, you know, that combined my business knowledge from getting my MBA with my passion and love for food. And I just thought, man, it'd be so cool if I could take this experience and as I planned on transitioning back to the US Continue down this path of working in the food business. And at the same time, I thought knowing how slow these big companies are to innovate and to really follow the consumer trends, I felt like there's a really incredible opportunity for an. For entrepreneurs in the food industry specifically. And I felt like I could start a business in the food industry and outmaneuver larger brands in the US that was the original thought. Got it.

Okay. I'm interested to hear from Cassandra how you got started this and then how you guys intersected, because that's I'm really interested about. And I know that you have a background previous to this also. You've done a few baby food companies, correct?

Yeah, well, this actually has evolved Once Upon a Farm evolved from some of the earlier formations of the company. It's been through a couple iterations. But, yeah, unlike Ari, I don't have an mba. I actually have a background in psychology. But I have always had a love of food. I'm obsessed with ingredients and health and nutrition. And in my master's program, I studied how nutrition affects development. So I love looking at it from that angle. You know, how is nutrition affecting our holistic health, mentally, emotionally, spiritually? And I've always been an entrepreneur at heart. I remember when I was. I think I was 8 years old starting this little bow company with my dad, where I would glue on these little. They were little bows that you see on the presents and was selling them in front of supermarkets. So that was my first experience of being an entrepreneur. But in my early 20s, I had a chocolate startup here in San Diego called Fortina Chocolate. We were in a few farmers markets and local stores in San Diego. And during this time, I was also helping teach nutrition classes and involved with that lifestyle and at the same time going to school for psychology. And then when I had my first daughter, I was making all of her own food and just found it to be very time consuming. But I Couldn't find anything that was fresh and convenient at the market at that time. All you could find was shelf stable baby food, which in my mind, and which is actually akin to canned food. But I, like most working parents and moms, I found that it was a challenge to make all of her food. I would spend four hours or more on Sundays doing all the food prep and I got tired. So I also found it very ironic that at the time, I was literally feeding my cat and my dog better than I could buy better food at the store than I could for my baby. And I was very familiar with hpp, the processing that we use to maintain the freshness and the nutrients of our product. And at that time, no one had applied that technology to baby food. And I figured if I was needing this life assist of being able to go to the store and buy something fresh and convenient for our most important little humans, that other moms were too. So I started doing farmers markets. And that point it was called Mother's Garden. I was delivering fresh baby food to parents doorsteps. Actually got a refrigerated van and was driving that around. You know, I had bigger visions for the company. I think it was in November of 2000. It was 14. All right. I had decided that I wanted to find a business partner. And Ari very persistently reached out on my website numerous times. And I at that time had gotten a ton of inquiries because it was this new product, it was this new technology that had never been done with baby food. And I didn't usually respond to any of them because, like, I'm not going to give away what I'm doing. No, I'm not going to talk to you. But he was persistent. So I called him back after maybe the third or fourth time, and we immediately hit it off and had a series of conversations. It was a great fit. We have very complimentary skills. And we decided to partner with living all the way across the country from each other. And Ari finally moved to San Diego, and we transformed it into Once Upon a Farm and filed the LLC in February 2015. And we're in our first major account all the way across the other side of the US at Whole Foods Northeast in January 2016. It's been rapid growth ever since.

Yep. I want to caveat two things. First of all, Cassandra, I don't know if it was conveniently or not, but she forgot to mention a really important part of the story, which was how she got to use HPP machines in the first place. So some people listening to this podcast might be Familiar with Suja. Great San Diego, Cold pressed Juice brand. And Cassandra had a roommate who taught a yoga class. And one of her students was a guy by the name of Jeff Church, who happened to be the CEO of Suja at the time. So Cassandra, hearing this, started going to that yoga class.

I love how everyone's gonna know this story now, Ari.

You know, Jennifer Garner told this story. I was on a call with Jennifer Gardner, and she told this story to a buyer like a week ago. So that's amazing. This story is legendary. But that, you know, you talk about persistence, that you talk about persistence. You know, I was persistent to get in touch with Cassandra, and I think that's. You'll. That's kind of like a running theme throughout this whole story is just being persistent, you know, going for it, just believing and trusting the process and believing in what we're doing.

Absolutely.

And by the way, when Cassandra was in San Diego running Mother's Garden, I also had a baby food company, which I started in Washington D.C. in my brother's basement, selling fresh made baby food at farmer's markets and not having kids. I just, you know, this was my foray into the world of food entrepreneurship in the U.S. my brother, who had two young boys at the time, really recommended that I think about going into better food for kids. And I just thought baby food was such a great idea because it's that entry point. And also very similar to Cassandra, you know, going to Whole Foods and going to natural food stores, you could see the only options were those shelf stable brands. So I could also see that there was an opportunity to bring something fresher to market. And Cassandra was the first person who had the brilliant idea of applying HPP to those fresh purees to give them the shelf life that you need to go to retail distribution. Wow.

Really cool story, Ari. What was the actual linchpin to get you to move to San Diego? Like, what was the milestone or something?

Two words, San Diego. I was living in Washington, D.C. at the time. I'm from LA, as I said originally. And I always had this inclination that I would eventually get back to SoCal. That was always my goal. It was just a question of when. And Cassandra, once you get to know her, you'll realize that if she's in on something, she's all in. And I felt very similarly when I met her. Like, I just felt like, I want to be all in on this business. I just. In order to be all in, I had to stop running the business that I was growing in D.C. and I had to Move and start this business with Cassandra, really from ground zero, minus the recipes that she had developed previously. So, you know, there was a lot of work that we had to do in those early days just to get off the ground. I mean, if you think about the fact that we went from literally just like ideas to full branding product in market at Whole Foods by within, I'd say, eight or nine months, I mean, that's a pretty incredible feat, you know, so we were really running hard for two straight years, really, but like literally every day just getting up and not stopping until we got what we needed to get accomplished every day. Wow.

And Cassandra, I mean, just hearing your continued story of running through walls, kind of the hustle, but also this awareness that you need other people around you for complementary skills and other things, you know, you didn't stop there with Ari. You added other people to the team as well too. Right. You eventually brought in another CEO and Jennifer Garner. Take us through that a little bit of kind of expanding that executive team.

Yeah. It's not always easy to do. I think as an entrepreneur and many that I've talked to have that same struggle of letting go of control. But you have to, to be able to scale the business. And as much as I like to wear many hats and get to know many areas of the business, it's not scalable that way. And there's people that can do it better than you. So to get to the vision of, you know, having a fresh, accessible food and really changing the landscape of childhood nutrition at retail and making it accessible to as many people as possible, I mean, we had to think bigger. And, you know, bringing John and Jen into that was part of that vision because, you know, John has a ton of experience. He's one of the most well known people in the food industry and is such a good fit for the brand. And Jennifer Garner, she obviously, she's the megaphone of the brand to be able to bring the awareness that we've needed. Being that first mover in this category where it is more unknown, people don't understand it as much, she was really able to accelerate the category. It's hard to bring people in, but you got to for sure.

And to go get them. Because it sounds like you went and found Jeff Church. What did you have to do to go find Jennifer Gardner? Different approach?

Well, a lot of the way that the business came together had a theme of serendipity in it. I mean, she was looking to work with a brand. And Ari knows the exact number. For how many years? Seven years. Yeah, she was looking to work with a brand for seven years, and one of our advisors knew her agent and he connected us with her and she requested that we send her some of our baby food. And we certainly weren't going to deny sending Jennifer Garner samples. Before we knew it, she was requesting a meeting with us up in la. And of course we weren't going to deny that. So we went up there and met with her and her vision of what she was looking for to get involved with in a brand, and our vision of what we were doing just was a perfect fit. Her work with Save the Children, you know, is such a perfect integration into the brand and it's something that we support now as a brand as well.

Yeah. And to take that story a step further, you know, so John Foraker, you know, as Cassandra said, I mean, he. He's one of the premier operators in the natural products industry. Somebody who, you know, grew Annie's Organic for 18 years as its CEO, from a $6 million a year company to a 250 million plus annualized business that sold to General Mills. And prior to selling to General Mills actually went public. He just is one of the few people in our industry who can literally say has seen it all. He was one of our earliest investors in 2015. He actually invested in the brand before we had any finished product to present to him. And the reason why he did that is because he had done a ton of research and he's had done a ton of research on the baby category because they considered it for a long time. And he always said he regretted not going into the category when they were looking at it. But in their research, they also found really compelling data that showed that exactly what we were doing was really this massive opportunity that could be capitalized on. So when he saw that we were the brand that was really taking this on, he wrote a check very early on. And when we met with Jennifer and we showed her our deck and she went through it, she noticed John Foraker's name and picture in our advisory board slide, and she recognized the Annie's brand from giving her kids a lot of cheddar bunnies and asked if she could meet him, you know, to talk about the food industry. And I actually was the one who called John to ask him if he'd be willing to fly down to LA to meet with Jennifer Garner. And luckily enough, he was a big Alias fan. But, you know, it was funny because at the, at the very beginning in that conversation, he said, oh, Ari, you know, all these celebrities are trying to get involved with brands now. Cause that's like the cool thing to do. And actually he was like, I don't know about this. He met her and literally within a three hour meeting, she convinced him to join, to join Once Upon a Farm with her. Because her alignment on passion for kids and to do right by them and her passion for good nutrition, her passion as a mom herself, I mean, all of these just wonderful things about Jennifer Garner aligned with the kind of person that John is. Again, this was the stars aligned kind of story. And in that meeting, Jen said, john, if you're in, I'm in. And John said, well, if you're in, I'm in. That really became our decision, right. Do we want to bring them in as co founders and essentially give up that control? I mean, I don't want to say it was an easy decision, but it was a very exciting decision to have in front of us to be able.

To make quite the validation. That's for sure, right? Not just having an investor who already is in, but now say I'm all in. On top of Jen as well. That's a pretty great story. How are you all? Like what's today like? How are you splitting your time? What parts are you all working on? On each part of the business, very different.

Cassandra, why don't you start?

Well, as the company's grown, I mean, Ari and I have both been able to focus in more on, you know, what we've really enjoyed in the early pieces of the business. And I'm focusing mostly on innovation. I'm behind all of the product development. I'm actually visioning a lot of the recipes and executing on them as well as working with different R and D agencies for innovation projects. And Ari?

Well, first of all, both Cassandra and I are on the leadership team, which, you know, we not only have our own positions and our responsibilities, but we're also, we're in frequent contact with all the department heads with John as well. And it's a great opportunity to be at the center of a company that is essentially run like a small blue chip cpg. There's just so much that we're both learning and absorbing by being so close to the center of this great company which went from eight or nine employees to now we have 41. Was it today on the call? I couldn't even count.

I couldn't count it either. The zoom screens keep growing.

It's incredible. So my primary responsibilities are in sales. I'm working with our, you know, our sales team and our VP of sales to Basically, I work on like all new business development, whether it's international or in all channels, Food service or even a lot of grocery up and down. California as well. It's just a lot more of a narrow focus, a lot of fun, and it's something that I love doing.

That's awesome. And now the team is spread, you know, a little bit across from San Diego and Berkeley. Is that right? Like kind of where that. Two kind of areas of focus of where the companies run from.

So the, the. Our headquarters moved out of San Diego to. To Berkeley. Most of our team, I mean, right now everyone is remote and who knows when we'll go back. But yeah, we. We have an office in Berkeley. We. Out of the 41 employees, probably about half of them are in, in or around Berkeley, and then everyone else is kind of scattered throughout the country. So it's a nice. It's actually a nice mix because if you are a remote employee, like, like we are. You know, the company's kind of built to support folks who don't necessarily go to the office every day, especially now. Right. We've really had to upgrade those capabilities. Yeah.

And how. How has the, the brand been during COVID I mean, has it. Grocery obviously is. Is treated differently now. Right. We're doing a lot more grocery than eating out, obviously.

What's.

What's Covid been like on. On Once Upon a Farm, Cassandra?

Yeah, well, given the category we're in, I mean, people aren't really going to compromise on their babies even during a pandemic. So in that sense, you know, we've. Our business has been very resilient during this time and even some pretty amazing growth over this past year. So we saw an immediate uptick in our D2C business. Of course, you know, many people naturally gravitated towards that, but in Ari can talk about more of how the retailers are transforming more to D2C as well, and how that has helped us. But overall, Covid has done us as well, and we've been able to hold steady in it. And I know not every business can say that, and a ton of learnings. I mean, I don't even know if we'll go back to what normal was before. It'll be a new normal. But we've been able to adapt very quickly too. And that's another really strong piece of our business is we think ahead, we. We can pivot very quickly and we can align the whole team in a different direction, which has been to our benefit. So. Strong point for sure.

Yeah. And John is really all about taking big bets. He kind of can see where the puck is going and wants us to be ahead of the curve at all times. Even back in April of last year, we were already making a hard pivot to increase our capabilities online, whether it was our own website or on retailers websites. Right. So you think about everything from shopping on Kroger.com or Target on your phone for delivery or pickup. You think about Instacart. You know, there's so many places where you can just go shopping for groceries from a device. That is really where we have seen the most growth come from. Also Amazon, right. Amazon delivery has been huge. So I think that really dialing in all those E tail channels has been a massive reason why we've been able to, as Kassandra said, you know, continue that growth curve. Because the fact is, is that most retailers, especially, you know, some of our best ones like Whole Foods, you know, their foot traffic is still down compared to where it was pre Pandemic. Right. In some cases as much as, you know, 20%. Even more so knowing that people aren't going in the stores as often, you know, they are purchasing online. When they do go into the stores, they tend to purchase more items at once and just shop less frequently. Some of that behavior post Pandemic is going to be here to stay in terms of people shopping online. But it remains to be seen how, how much that that shift stays put.

Got it.

Also, I think that the. The awareness has grown even more so around health and immunity. I mean, we have a product that has met and meets all of those things that consumers are looking for for even more so right now. So that I think is another variable as to what has supported our growth over this past year. And then not only have we been kind of ahead of the curve in the D2C aspect, but also with new innovation that we're going to be launching with soon, it's kind of right on par with what consumers are wanting during this time.

Yeah.

And comes from you guys bringing good people around you, obviously. It sounds like. And freeing up some of your time as co founders to do what you guys are good at and focus on that, which is pretty great and pretty smart to do that. Another aspect is obviously the background in San Diego. Cassandra, you've done a few businesses here in the food space. Ari, you've gotten involved in creating community for, you know, natural products entrepreneurs. Do you guys want to touch on a little bit kind of like the magic that is here that's in San Diego? Cassandra, I'd love To hear from you first maybe.

Yeah. San Diego is just such an amazing hub for entrepreneurs. There's a lot of forward thinking people here, but especially with females too. I think it's a great opportunity for female entrepreneurship. I think San Diego has one of the highest percentage of women graduating with a STEM major and it really contributes to a lot of the forward thinking innovation here. You know, there's the HERA hub which started here, which was the first female international co working space ad. Astra has stemmed off that which, you know, helps support women early stage that are in early stage businesses, takes them through an accelerator program. And then there's so many amazing food companies here as Ari mentioned earlier. You know Suja, they were a big inspiration and help in the beginning when it started out as mother's garden and to get the get traction with the whole technology of hpp. So it's been a great springboard of not only food, but other forward thinking women entrepreneurs who are very supportive that have helped me to along my journey and process.

That's great to hear, especially on the female entrepreneur side. And you're right, Felina has been an inspiration to a lot of people around that. Ari, do you want to take us through a little bit about how you've kind of coalesced and helped Naturally San Diego come together?

Yeah, absolutely. So early 2000, I want to say 19, a group of people met at Good on you in Encinitas and had a nice lunch together and discussed the prospect of putting together a small community, you know, of brands and people who work in the natural food space here or the natural products industry. I should say that meeting was, it was great because I could see that, you know, there were just a lot of people who were interested in being a part of a community. But it takes a little bit more than just wanting something to exist for it to exist. Right. Somebody has to be the catalyst that really gets everybody together and gets things going so you can build the foundation of a real organization that can last and really do great things. So I started working on this. You know, I got together with a national organization called Naturally Network, which started in Boulder, Colorado with Naturally Boulder. And I talked to their executive leadership about their affiliate program and what it would take for San Diego to create an affiliate of their network and kind of just started there, you know, reaching out to a few people I knew and getting people in the same room together to talk about this idea. Throughout 2019, you know, I had these monthly meetings and every meeting there'd be new faces and a few more People would come in, you know, I had enough kind of traction to where I decided, okay, I'm going to put my stake in the ground. So I filed for the, the 501C6. Naturally San Diego bought the website domain and just started going and said, you know what? Hail Mary, I think this is going to work. There's enough people who want this to happen. It just, you know, somebody needs to create the framework. So you know, fast forward to today. We have an incredible organization. We have two part time employees. We have an incredible group of companies that have come to actually sponsor the organization. Everyone From Kashi to Pattaya plus to Dr. Bronner's to Suja to Chase bank, we have chosen foods. I mean, name me a great legacy brand in San Diego. And they're either in our group or we're talking to them about being in our group. We have put together this just incredible board of directors who've really helped us with everything from monthly programming where we have virtual networking events, we have coffee and convos once a month. We have new member orientations once a month. We also have a founder series where Matt Clifford, who is a founder himself and co founded Barnana, interviews founders of other companies. So he's interviewed, you know, Bill Keith from Perfect Bar, he's interviewed Star Edwards from Bitch and Sauce, this in March. He's interviewing Jimbo Somak from Jimbo's so you know, we'll get to hear those great stories. And we just announced this week that our call for applications has gone live. So we, you know, one of my biggest passions and reasons for doing this is to support the next generation of food entrepreneurs or I should say really natural CPG entrepreneurs here in San Diego. And we've put together an incredible pitch slam that we're going to be putting on on April 8th. And the prize is mind blowing to me. You get retail distribution in premier natural food stores throughout San Diego. We have an incredible panel of judges that will provide them with great feedback. If you're selected to be a finalist, you'll get a mentor to help you with your pitch prior to the pitch slam. And you'll also win an Expo east booth which if you, if you're in the food industry, I mean, you know those get, those are pretty expensive. And Expo east is one of the premier trade shows for our industry. So you know, that combined with the consulting that we're getting from Purely Righteous anyway, it's just, it's just an incredible array of prizes, you know, it couldn't have been put together if we didn't have such a tremendous amount of support from both the people and the brands that are here that, you know, want to give back and want to give back to the community. So, you know, San Diego really is a special place. It really is unique place. I think that it's a community of people who like to get things done. It's a community of people who like to see other people accomplishing their dreams and like to, you know, likes to support people who, who have a vision and have passion and want to move forward. So, you know, hopefully naturally San Diego can be that conduit for the natural products industry here for years to come.

That's incredible. Congrats on that. Especially to have these new orgs that come up and help industry specific, you know, like this as well. On top of all the other resources that are here in town, just that domain expertise. I mean, you guys know this goes so far as opposed to just like a general entrepreneurship mentor, which is great. But then someone who on top of that says, and let me help you open the door to those connections. Congratulations on what you built. That's awesome and very San Diego thing to do. The other very San Diego thing is tacos. And you guys being in the natural food space, the pressure is on. We gotta know, do you have a favorite taco spot? I'll allow maybe taco spots if you want to do different categories of them. But we gotta know, Ari, you go first. Damn it.

Putting me on the spot. All right, all right. So I can say like this type of taco here, that type of taco there kind of thing.

Yeah, you've got like your midnight late night after drinking taco and then you've got your high end sit down taco. You know, if that's how you want to categorize it, you can do it that way.

Fair enough, Fair enough. So I mean I got to go for straight up carne asada tacos. I got to go taco stand. To me, they make the best carne asada tacos I've ever had. Hands down for the, I guess you could say fancy tacos, like the seafood or like if I'm going to get an octopus taco or something like that. I actually really like city taco. It's a fast growing, I feel like they're popping up all over the place. But every experience I've had there has been fantastic. And then if I want to go a little bit higher end, I've really been impressed by puesto and what those guys have been doing because I think they're definitely elevating what a taco can be.

Good choices. No, wrong answer though. Cassandra, how about you?

Yeah, we share one in common, Ari. I was going to mention Puesto, but my number one favorite it is Hago's Organic Tacos in Encinitas. Anything you get there, you just can't go wrong. That would be my number one.

Okay. It's a new one to the show and we will add it to the database. Appreciate that. Good one. I've recently discovered Los Tacos in Encinitas and it's become a pretty staple over the last few months, so.

Nice.

We like our north county tacos, it sounds like.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, guys, it's been so great to have you on, hear your story, hear your involvement in the community. Thank you for that and we are very excited. Sounds like lots of new things coming and wishing you all guys all the best in 2021.

Thank you so much.

It's been a pleasure. Neil, it's good to see you. Thank you for having us.

It was great talking with you.

Absolutely. Thank you guys.

Thanks for joining us on the Tacos and Text podcast with Neil Bloom. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding the reach of the San Diego tech ecosystem. Big shout out to School of Rap for our rad intro music. And thanks as well to Nest Podcast network where we are recording live inside their studio at Nest Co working in Bankers Hill. You can find Neil Bloom on Twitter eelbloom as well as fresh brewed tech and tacos and tech pod on Twitter too.

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